During the Victorian era, England experienced tremendous
growth in wealth and industry while Ireland struggled to survive. The reasons
for Ireland's inability to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution are
complex, and have been the subject of debate for more than a century. Many
English viewed the Irish as stubborn farmers who refused to embrace the new
technology. The Irish, however, believed the English had sabotaged their efforts
to industrialize. The truth of why the Irish fared so badly while England became
the most powerful nation in the world probably lies somewhere between these two
extremes.

It's a common assumption that Ireland's mass exodus during the first
half of the l9th century was the result of the disastrous potato blight of 1845,
but the famine was actually the proverbial last straw. Until the 17th century,
the Irish, like much of feudal Europe, consisted of many peasants under the rule
of a minority of wealthy landowners. When Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland in the
mid-17th century, those landowners who refused to give up Catholicism saw their
property confiscated and then redistributed to the English Army. By 1661, 40% of
Ireland was owned by England. Many Irish peasants-stayed on as tenant farmers,
working the land and paying rent for the small plots of land where they lived
and grew their own food. But as crops became less profitable, many landowners
began taking back the land from the Irish poor in order to graze sheep and
cattle for English consumption. This led to a series of evictions, where tenant
farmers were forced off the land that sustained them, often with no warning at
all. One of the worst, now known as the Ballinglass Incident, (after the west
coast village in County Galway), took place on March 13, 1846, about 6 months
after the potato blight appeared. Anticipating mass starvation from the previous
failed crop, Mrs. Gerrard, like many landowners, feared nonpayment of
rent from her tenants, and suddenly leveled 61 houses occupied by 76 families.
The following is an eyewitness account taken from The Great Hunger.

The inhabitants were not in arrear of their rent, and had, by their
industry, reclaimed an area of about four hundred acres from a neighboring
bog. On the morning of the eviction a 'large detachment of the 49th Infantry
commanded by Captain Brown' and numerous police appeared with the Sheriff and
his men...the people were officially called on to give up possession, and the
houses were then demolished --roofs torn off, walls thrown down. The scene was
frightful; women running, wailing with pieces of their property and clinging
to door-posts from which they had to be forcibly torn; men cursing, children
screaming with fright. That night the people slept in the ruins; next day they
were driven out, the foundations of the house were torn up and razed, and no neighbor
was allowed to take them in.

Tenant farmers who weren't evicted found there was less land available
to them, and these shrinking plots were being shared by more and more occupants.
This diminishing land contributed much to Ireland's eventual reliance on the
potato during the late 18th century. Potatoes didn't rob the soil of its
nitrogen, and the amount of land needed to grow potatoes could feed more people
than the same amount of land used to grow a grain crop like wheat. By the time
the 1845 blight appeared, approximately 3 million people consumed little else,
and the average adult male was eating 12-14 pounds per day.

Before the Great Famine, many Irish were already being squeezed by
rising rents and a sluggish job market. The agricultural industry grew but
modern machinery eliminated the need for much of its manual labor. And while
agriculture became more limited to workers, industry in Ireland wasn't faring
much better. There was some manufacturing in Dublin and Belfast which included
tanneries, glassmaking, and the spinning and weaving of linen. After England's
invasion, Ireland was forbidden to export these items as well as the wool
sweaters and Wexford china which had been the major source of its wealth. This
ban was lifted in 1824, but the damage to this trade was already done.
Furthermore, that same year, the English removed its own Irish duties, flooding
the Irish market with cheaper English goods and textiles. As a result, Ireland's
domestic industry collapsed. Their own industrial revolution was stunted before
it ever really began, and these workers were forced back into agriculture with
its already overtaxed labor pool of farmers. By 1835, only 1/3 of all Irish
laborers had regular work.

Hunger, poverty and even famine were not strangers to the Irish poor in
the first half of the l9th century, particularly in the rural south and west of
the country. But by the time the 1945 potato blight hit, there were no other
resources left for these people. They had no other means of making a living, and
farmers and landlords who depended on receiving rents from them were now
vulnerable too. There was nothing else for the Irish poor to eat, and such
absolute dependence on this one commodity resulted in one of the worst disasters
in history. It doesn't seem possible to imagine their misery. Death phases, and
those who didn't starve often fell fever and dysentery caused from eating, in
putrid diseased potatoes. In their weakened others would suffer "relapse
fever" or become to cholera and typhus, which soon became known in the
United States and England as "Irish fever."

Between 1841 and 1851, Ireland's population of 8 million had dwindled
down to 6 million. An estimated half of these people left the country while the
other million died. Most of these deaths occurred in those under the age of 10
or over the age of 60. While these young and old made up less than 1/3 of the
total population, they accounted for 3/5 of the deaths. This is partly due to
the children's vulnerability to dysentery and the elderly's inability to fight
off typhus. But to some extent, "lifeboat ethics" were being
practiced, similar to decisions made in an overcrowded lifeboat. A child might
not be fed so that the food could sustain his working teenaged brother.

Of the million Irish inhabitants who emigrated during this decade, most
went to America and England. These were not the first Irish to emigrate, but the
countries which hosted them were overwhelmed by this new wave of immigrants.
Between 1815 and 1845, almost a third of North America's immigrants were Irish.
Many were young, single, and had a little more money than those rural occupants
who would later experience the Great Famine. These earlier immigrants had few
technical skills, and their agricultural skills were limited to the
spade-culture of potatoes and animal tending. But they were considered to be
healthy and strong, and provided cheap casual labor. Some American contractors
even recruited Irish labor through newspapers in Dublin, Cork, and Belfast, for
the vast construction of railways, canals and roads.

But the refugees in 1847 were half-starved, weak, destitute, and
incapable of hard manual labor. Too poor to leave Ireland when the crisis began,
these families found passage on overcrowded, fever-ridden ships after a few
businessmen discovered they could make money transporting these desperate Irish
at bargain group rates. On one of these "coffin ships," as they came
to be known, 20% of the passengers sailing from Cork to Quebec died during or
just after the trip.

By 1847, there were 37,000 Irish immigrants in Boston alone, making up
a full third of its entire population. In The Immigrants, Oscar Handlin
describes them as "a massive lump in the community, undigested and
indigestible." These newcomers had no skills, no tools, no education to
become clerks, and the factories where they might have found work a decade
earlier had moved out to Lowell, Lawrence, and Waltham. Many men had to be
supported by their wives and daughters who worked as domestic servants in hotels
and private homes, while they themselves worked sporadically sweeping streets,
tending horses, cleaning stables, cutting fish, and performing any other menial
work they could find.

For the next several decades, standards of living improved for the
Boston Irish, as their sons became plumbers, carpenters, and police, and new
Italian immigrants took over the more lowly jobs. But the first Irish immigrants
to arrive here occupied terribly overcrowded slums in the North End and Fort
Hill, often living in conditions which rivaled the misery they had fled.

England too had received Irish immigrants before the famine, and found
that what the Irish lacked in industrial skills they made up for in physical
strength. They were considered ideal as steelworkers and dockers to lift heavy
cargo onto the ships. But the English must have been terrified by the sight of
the destitute men women and children landing in their ports in 1846. Not only
were they judging this last wave of immigrants when these people had hit rock
bottom financially, physically and spiritually, but the living conditions they
had become accustomed to through their poverty shocked even the poorest English.
They viewed the Irish slums in disgust, and decided that their overcrowded
residences, which out of sheer necessity often housed several families in one or
two rooms, provided further evidence that the Irish were breeding uncontrollably
and even preferred to live in such squalor. England's poor also viewed the Irish
as potential "knob-sticks" who would drive down already meager wages
and this alienated them from those who might at least have understood their
poverty.

While some of them went to inland factory towns such as Manchester,
many Irish resided in the towns near the port where they landed, such as
Lancashire, London, and Liverpool. By 1851, 25% of Liverpool's population was
Irish. Many others joined the English Army, where, until 1870, recruits signed
on for life, so those who enlisted were either devoted or desperate. In 1851,
37% of The English Army were Irish.

The Irish lived on the absolute fringes of Victorian society either as
unskilled day labor or among Henry Mayhew's costermongers --those street
peddlers who, as a group, Mayhew estimated to be 3/8 Irish.

The upper classes of England feared the strain these poor Irish would
put on their charities, which, considering their well-established attitude
toward their own poor, hardly seems like a legitimate worry. As we've discussed
in class, from the early 1830s, poverty was no longer viewed as unfortunate, but
immoral, and it was commonly believed that anyone with enough determination
could be financially solvent. This general attitude was reinforced by
philosophers and economists who promoted laissez-faire. Regarding the Irish,
Thomas Malthus, a noted English economist, explained the earlier famines and
starvation in Ireland as God's answer to the overpopulation of those who refuse
to show restraint, much the same way that some right extremists today explain
the AIDS epidemic as the wrath of God against alternative lifestyles. In 1845,
Malthus had already died, but his sentiments and explanations for the lot of the
poor were alive and well, and served to justify the fear and prejudice of the
Irish immigrants on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Irish were stereotyped as drunks and criminals,
breeding without restraint and responsible for allowing their own backward ways
to impoverish them. With little to eat and few extra clothes, their slovenly
appearance was used as proof that they were dirty by nature. In both the United
States and England, they were further isolated by their Catholic religion which
was considered to be a lack of patriotism in England and a full-fledged
religious conspiracy to some of the Brahmins of Boston.